Conventionally, in a liquid crystal panel (LCD) being a liquid crystal display element that is generally used, a pair of substrates that are made of, for example, glass and each have electrodes, are bonded together by a sealed portion being an adhesive while a liquid crystal layer is interposed between them, and by applying an electric field to the liquid crystal layer, light transmission/blocking are controlled by the liquid crystal layer to display an image.
When manufacturing such a liquid crystal panel, a so-called one-drop-fill (ODF) method is used.
In such a liquid crystal panel, to accurately control driving of the liquid crystal material of the liquid crystal layer, it is important to control the distance between the substrates (cell gap), and if this distance varies, it leads to display unevenness. As a method for controlling this distance, there is a method in which spherical gap holding members, that is, spacers are sprayed before the substrates are bonded together, however, generally, a columnar pattern, that is, spacers are formed on the pixels of either one of the substrates by using an organic material, etc., with translucency. Specifically, the spacers are positioned at the inner side of the sealed portion and control the gap between the substrates.
In recent years, in a liquid crystal panel to be used for, for example, particularly, a mobile terminal such as a cell phone and a smart phone, to secure a large display region while keeping the small external form, the light shielding portion called a frame region from the display region to the panel end portion is made very narrow, that is, the frame can be increasingly narrowed. The sealed portion for bonding substrates together is disposed in the frame region, so that as the frame is made narrower, the width of the sealed portion becomes narrower, and the bonding area between the substrates decreases and the adhesion becomes weaker. When applying the sealing member, a dispenser being an application device is used, and particularly, at the corner portions, a technique for accurately bending the corner portions at a right angle is not established, so that the corner portions become arcs with a certain level of curvature. On the other hand, to adapt to a narrower frame structure and produce more liquid crystal panels from one large-sized substrate, a layout in which the gap between panels adjacent to each other is small or no gap between panels is adopted. Therefore, to cut-out panels with high accuracy, an outer edge spacer is disposed at the position of the cutting line, and the large-sized substrate is cut together with the outer edge spacer at the position of the outer edge spacer. Therefore, at the positions of the corner portions of each liquid crystal panel, in terms of the manufacturing process for bonding the large-sized substrates together, until the large-sized substrates are cut and divided into panels, voids are formed between the corner portions of the sealing member and the outer edge spacer on the outer sides of the corner portions. The large-sized substrates are bonded together in a vacuum, so that when bonding the substrates together, a liquid crystal material is filled on the inner side of the sealing member, however, the outer side of the sealing member becomes a void. Therefore, when the large-sized substrates are released in the atmosphere after being bonded together, the outer side of the sealing member suddenly changes from a vacuum to the atmospheric pressure, so that the atmospheric pressure is applied from the outer side of the sealing member not being completely cured, and the position of the sealing member deviates inward. Even if the void portion is kept in a vacuum, the substrates are pushed by the atmospheric pressure and warp, and accordingly, unevenness of the gap (gap unevenness) between the substrates easily occurs.